User blog:Nathanhazz/March Progress Report
Progress report, you ask? Consider this the official announcement of irregular monthly progress reports. The last few months have seen an incredible amount of progress on many things, but none of it is quite ready for primetime. In an effort to not spam you with announcements once all those finish at once, I give you the IW wiki's first progress report: Age Of Strife First of all, updates for Age Of Strife are complete! Loads of work has gone on, and we've found a new hero/grunt: Vandammetje. In our last update, we left a call that lots of content was outdated. Vandammetje took up the call, and manually wrote out all our Trial Rewards, and Paragon Levels, and even went the extra mile to create a Trial Difficulty page, an incredibly useful table that shows the difficulty of every challenge for a Trial of the Skill. Demi Guides As you may know, Demigod100, or Aparthax*Almighty, has faded into the background these past few months, to focus on school and work. In his time, he left quite a mark on the wiki, and his guides are featured in key places, even being linked in the top navigation. Sadly, they've fallen critically out of date as the game has changed. Now originally, the answer seemed clear. Let's remove these guides from the navigation, and just let users find more up-to-date guides via the class pages. That was... until we realized Class/Pet Combos is the single most visited page on the entire wiki, amassing more than 5,000 views a week, nearly double that of even our homepage. Something had to be done for this woefully out of date page. Fortunately, Vandammetje stepped forward again, and took up the mantle. Now Class/Pet Combos is a page the wiki doesn't have to ashamed of, and users of this resource can hopefully find some information that actually applies. Challenges Challenges remain one of our most outdated resources. There's 97 of them, it's difficult to know when an update has affected one or the other, and a user will usually only reference it once. So unfortunately, the guides on these pages are often the first thing a new user sees, and could very likely be woefully out of date. Again, Vandammetje has been crawling through many of these, updating and clarifying where he can. In this case, however, I'd ask you, the humble wiki reader, to step forward and make these edits as you come across them. The only way these pages can be reasonably maintained is if each person who references it corrects the errors they see. Some of these challenge pages are getting 500+ views a week, so your update really does matter, and helps the whole community. Upgrades Upgrades have been reworked into another automatically updating system by Spazou, our tireless technical guru who pulls data directly from the game itself. This means upgrades are no longer written out manually, allowing much quicker and easier updates going forward, and a guaranteed up-to-date state of all upgrades today. We've also added an Upgrades table to each class page, and an overall count of how many Upgrades a class has, to help you with the new "Total Upgrades" achievements. If you're interested in seeing a little behind the curtain of how this works, you can check out Module:Upgrades and Module:Data/Upgrades. Spell Formulas In a feat of tedium worthy of Vandammetje, Spazou has also manually updated every single formula for all 113 spells. This was a colossal feat, and means not a single formula on the wiki is out of date today. So you can go ahead and confidently use these numbers to make exact calculations about whatever your math-nerd hearts desire. Visual Update You've probably already noticed we've updated our logo. The previous logo was from before I even started playing the game, and Spazou and I wanted to take a look at how we can visually upgrade the wiki to something more current. Also, the homepage has been updated for the first time since IW's anniversary nearly 6 months ago. Now that we've dabbled in this and figured out how it works, who's to say what might come of this in the future.... Beta Testing In the last month, myself and Spazou have been invited to the closed beta for Idle Wizard. We're putting our in-depth knowledge of the game from editing and maintaining this wiki actually guiding the updates of the game itself. And, this is a mutually beneficial arrangement, as being in beta allows us to know the content of future updates before they're even released. Which all means we can begin work to prepare the wiki, and the BiS calculator, before the updates are even released. In fact, I've already used this advantage to update my TA Archon Guide for v0.8b less than 8 hours after the update released. You can expect faster updates and BiS support in the future as a result of this exciting new opportunity. Coming Up Now at this point... you may be wondering, why am I the one writing this article, while Vandammetje is clearly the person actually updating the wiki? Now that we've covered the front-end content, let's take a look at what features are in the works for the future. BiS Sadly, the BiS calc is still not updated for "Age Of Strife". As I mentioned in the last post, Offhands require a complete rewrite, and this is still going on. Of course, I'll be letting you know here, and in #announcements as soon as an update is released, so you can update your guides. Fortunately for us though, no items have changed except for the addition of Offhands, and there are clear choices for which to use in most cases. It's still safe to use the BiS to recommend all your items besides this one slot. Attributes Back in early February, when I first released the Guide to Guides, I felt that the wiki had a great way to display everything we needed, except for one thorn in my side.... that thorn was attributes. Most guides are vague in this regard, giving bullet points about each attribute, and maybe minimum values for what you'll need. Even my own guides fail to give clear advice of exactly what's best to do with your number of attributes. To that end, we've been secretly working on a new template, called the AttributeEmbed. It's not ready yet, and will change, but I've been partnering with Spazou to implement a new BiS function to provide an export that recommends a complete set of attributes, based on the amount you currently have. Once it's complete, this will be the silver bullet to attributes, and allow any player to get exact point-by-point optimal recommendations. You can definitely look forward to more to come on this! Charts Long, long ago, Darktyle wrote a python script to generate svgs that would chart out formulas, so you could get a more visual look at how a spell worked. This was an incredibly cool idea, but today, this feature is woefully neglected, and every single chart is out of date, and nobody is even set up to run this script. We considered figuring out how to run the script and generate new charts, but this would only move the problem to some future date, and would be an incredible hassle to maintain when spell formulas changed. We needed a new solution. Enter ChartJS. Thanks to the preceding work of this this extension, we've been able to implement a graphing system that can take a list of points and render it as a curve in real-time. It's hidden away in 2 templates: Chart, and RawChart. However, don't be afraid that this looks terribly confusing to use, we're looking forward to combining this with Spazou's powerful spell exports to automatically calculate relevant points, that would update automatically when the formula changes. This is certainly another project to look forward to in the future. Wrapping Up Phew, and now you can probably see why we desperately needed to wrap these into a larger article. The next Progress Report shouldn't be nearly as long, as it won't be combining three months of work. I hope you enjoyed this review of what's happening, and the sneak peek behind the scenes as to what's coming. Huge thanks to Vandammetje, Spazou, and everyone else who's contributed these past few months. You are what keeps this wiki alive, and such a helpful resource for everyone playing. Category:Blog posts